Stolen Song: How the Troubadours Became French by Eliza Zingesser (review)

In our present state of nationwide quarantine, complicated by resounding plagues of fake news, social injustice and unrest, and all amplified by unprecedented social media outcry, Eliza Zingesser's Stolen Song offers a welcome, fresh perspective on a medieval past. Her study not only intervenes within current historical literary criticism and reception theory surrounding the troubadours but also provides an outlet for personal reflection vis-à-vis an age long past that can help us understand our current cultural condition more intimately. Conducting a thorough examination of Occitan linguistic traits as transmitted within the corpus of francophone manuscripts containing troubadour song and Occitan lyric insertion, the author illuminates instances of authorial effacement, erasure, and delineation of "otherness," charting cultural appropriation that rescripted troubadour song within the context of the overarching French musico-poetic heritage. This rescripting effectively downgraded the repertoire from its place of prestige within western European traditions and transformed it to nearly invisible primitive rusticity for its francophone audience. Zingesser's arguments are convincingly parsed out with great care and are solidly founded by primary source study alongside forerunning secondary scholarship, especially that of Sarah Kay—an obviously significant influence.

After a detailed introduction describing the "minoritizing sound translation" (32–33) that "dismantles the tradition of troubadour song" (36), subsuming Occitan lyric into a Gallicized sound world, chapter 1 surveys repertoire found in BnF MS fr. 844 that is reduced to nonsemantic noise through grammatic distortion and anchored to birdsong and the nonhuman, effaced of humanity through anonymity, and even made to suggest insanity through garbled text and performance of nonsense syllables. These two sections alone comprise more than a third of the entire book and supply a solid ideological foundation for the remaining material. Chapters 2 through 4 expand on the book's established themes through close readings of Occitan lyrical insertions into three French narratives—Jean Renart's Roman de la rose, Gerbert de Montreuil's Roman de la violette, and Richard de Fournivall's Bestiaire d'amour—exhibiting the delocalization of Occitan repertoire remapped to border regions of France; constructions of eroticism and incomprehensibility through birdsong and fetishization of French culture; multivoiced sonic spectacle creating opacity; prioritization of sound over sense encouraging reduced listening (or, hearing but not comprehending); erasure through tornada omission, premature memorialization, and labels of otherness; and the ultimate delyricization of troubadour song through associations with the hoopoe (a bird never associated with lyric singing in medieval bestiaries or treatises), the recasting of Occitan lyric into prosaic/writerly traditions, relegation of the troubadours to a classical past despite contemporary temporality, and by "bleaching" (168) it of any Occitan connotation. All of this, along with many other details too extensive to list here, obscures the original language, transforms the cultural identity of Occitan song, inserts it into the French literary lineage, and obliterates its independence from France.

The book could end at this point and seem complete and impactful, but Zingesser's most important contribution arrives in chapter 5, where she proposes a corpus of "Occitanizing French Song" (169), which is to say French songs colored by an Occitan "southern" (172) dialect that engage with more base themes than the canso/grand chant courtois. The canso, as Zingesser highlights, was labeled as an elite genre by Johannes de Grocheio (De musica, ca. 1300) and Dante Alighieri (De vulgari eloquentia, ca. 1300), and is the genre with which the troubadours were most commonly associated—outside of France. While the Gallicized songs discussed in the previous chapters associate the prestigious canso with French language, the Occitanizing songs—a relatively small body of, roughly, a dozen songs—degrade the prestige of the Occitan lyric tradition and associate the language with rustic, bawdy themes focused on the lower classes/registers, thereby rescripting Occitan away from its original place of refinement and courtly culture. Interestingly, Zingesser incorporates polyphonic motets into this corpus and spends a significant amount of time analyzing them to illustrate her points. This marks the first time in the...